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It’s that time of year, again. The time of year when everyone asks me about the recipe of my soft pretzel stuffing.

As I was born of southern climes, I have…opinions about the so-called “cuisine” offered by the Northern region of these United States. The concept of soft-pretzelstuffing, however, is a glory I cannot and will not deny. It was first introduced to me at a “Friendsgiving” party, and while the original creator was tight-fisted with the recipe (he has since relented, giving me a list of instructions far too long to replicated, even if they do finally find a use for gibblets), I have made my own.

The nature of the soft pretzel, being salty and buttery before you even begin, allows a recipe that is sheer elegance in its simplicity. You can dress up a soft pretzel if you like, I suppose. But why would you?

Episode 25 (also Episode 200, if you’re counting the old way), breaks with the format yet again—if you’ve finished A Good Guy With A Magic Sword, you may have some guesses on how—because I’m never satisfied with boxes, even those I build myself.

Even In Arcadia started life back in the old version of VFPX, where it was just prose that I read. Part of the plan for redoing it for the new version was to add the scenes I never got a chance to do back then. But once all the parts of the old version were written up as dialogue, it was clear that the bulk of the episode was already written.

Those other scenes may see the light of day sometime, in another version. “Alien refugees hide out as Edwardian servants” does seem to be an idea I can’t get enough of, ever since it occurred to me watching PBS’s Manor House.

In addition to that fine bit of programming, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia is also an influence, if the title wasn’t clear enough indication. I first saw that play as teenager, and it’s never left me. I don’t think about it often, but when I do, I remember with a crystal clarity I wish I had for, you know, actual things that have happened to me. I always pull out Rosencratz & Guilderstern Are Dead as a favorite Stoppard piece—certainly several characters in VFPX tip their hat to the Player King—but I may be lying to myself.

With the exception of the wondrous Jennifer Sommerfield, all of the actors were recorded over Skype—a necessary evil when you realize that all of your cast needs to have UK accents. The only one accent is natural; everyone else is faking it, and doing a cracking good job of it, too. Proper accents meant going to trained theater types, which means the performances are all top-notch, even if I had to direct them over the phone.

Nick did his over a cell phone in the midst of theater festival, and it is still fantastic. That’s why I work with professionals.

It’s kind of a low-key episode. The humor is gentler, the stakes are purposely misleading, and when the ending is so at odds with the rest of the story the violence is amplified ten-fold. Which, again, was on purpose.

(Pretty much all of VFPX is on purpose, by the by. I’ve had people ask me about references in titles and characters misspeaking idioms and the like, and yes, all of it is on purpose. Even the things the actors bring to the show that I didn’t plan for is kept in the edit for specific reasons.)

Still, the ending aside, a low-key episode. Which I like. Despite my love of pulp velocity, I’m a bit of a ponderous writer by nature. Sometimes it’s nice to just hang out in a place, before it’s gone for good…

Speaking of hanging out in a place, how much fun is Cyriania? I’d just finished Lev Grossman’s The Magicians when I was pulling this episode together, and watching him grind his axes against Narnia, Oz, Hogwarts and Dungeons & Dragons certainly affected this episode. While it’s interesting to peer into Grossman’s “what if magic wasn’t any fun” worldview, even he couldn’t help enjoying himself when that bear waddled into frame. Talking animals are great, even when they’re used to nakedly explore gun control.

Like every queer person, I was deeply affected by the Pulse nightclub massacre. So much so, this episode kicked another idea out of the Episode 24 slot I had been thinking about longer (don’t worry; Players Of Games will show up in Season 3). I needed to talk about it, and this episode became the vessel for that, the result of my irritations with the facile arguments about assault weapons that bobbed up and down in the wake of the tragedy.

One thing I noticed when bringing this episode together: it’s really easy to be racist in a fantasy context. Half this episode is improv, and without any prompting from me, each and everyone of the actors said something disparaging about ogres, or trolls, or elves, as group. That sort of casual fantastical racism mirrored nicely the casual real-life racism that accompanies any discussion about gun control, so it was put in the scripted portions, too.

There will probably be a return to Cyriania to dig into the weird racist attitudes that prop up fantasy worlds. There’s a lot to dig into, there. Plus, we never talk to a Tanuki! After watching The Eccentric Family, I’ve got a lot of Tanuki ideas…

Ellen Kushner returned for this episode, because I can’t have a story about swords and not include the author of Swordspoint. I’m considering putting an unedited version of the improve we did, because over half of it was edited out, and it was all so good!

Next episode is the Halloween special and the last episode of Season 2 as well as being the 25th and 200th episode. It’s also shaping up to be one of my favorite episodes of the show. I can’t wait to share it with you.

Let’s go down the list, shall we? There’s coping with loss, detectives as metaphor, the mutability of the human body, queerness, Anglophillia, the meaning of heroism, the power of community, the limits of control, and most tellingly, superheroes. There’s a character who manages to simultaneously be a reference the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Alex Raymond and Jorge Luis Borges, another who has no patience for me or my shenanigans, and a third who has several lines in an almost impenetrable slang favored by British gay men in 30s.

Also, jokes at the expense of eugenics and Nazis. Because, obviously.

Beyond the absolute joy of writing such a thing, I was able to work with an absolutely astound collection of talented actors: Len Webb of The Black Tribbles, Isa St. Clair, Phil Thomas and Andy Holman of West Phillians, and Sonia Williams all gave their A-Game to this bizarre script, which, quite frankly, asked a lot of them as performers. They had to be comfortable playing cartoons in the beginning only to have their characters slowly gain three dimensions by the show’s end. Not easy to do, and the fact that they are so successful is a tribute to their amazing talent.

Also? Because it was a live show, we had to rehearse with everyone together, which was an absolute dream for me. I can’t do every episode that way—for scheduling reasons and because some of my favorite actors are not in this city—but did I start to have fantasies of every episode of VFPX being a live show with those five performers?

Yes. yes I did.

There’s a lot to unpack in this script (Jared Quirk Shop, remember) so I might as well break it down. Skip this part if you haven’t listened to episode yet, you can pick back up when you see the photo of the cast:

The Wake Of The Lacuna – You have no idea how overjoyed I was when Erin, a friend and a fan of VFPX who came to live show, told me she got all the wordplay in this title.

A lacuna is a missing element, and the fact that The Lacuna as her “nom de magnifying glass” puts her in the same category of detectives as that faceless wonder, The Question. But a lacuna is also an underwater cave, and it can have a wake of its own that is dangerously difficult to get caught in. The End of Time Club are at the Lacuna’s wake, but are also caught in the current her movement created.

The End of Time Club – The End of Time Club gets its name from “The End of the Earth Club,” a group of amateur and professional explorers who included in their ranks Mark Twain and Robert Peary, and was presided over by Rudyard Kipling (another thing they had in common? An astounding amount of racism). Also an influence is Warren Ellis and John Cassaday’s Justice League of pulp heroes from PLANETARY, which has analogues of Doc Savage, The Shadow, James Bond and an all-purpose “aviator,” just as the End of Time Club does.

But a far more direct origin is a Saturday morning cartoon “Defenders of the Earth,” which has Flash Gordon lead a group of other newspaper comics action heroes, The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician and Lothar. I loved this show as child—had the Phantom and the Mandrake action figures, as well as a Ming the Merciless for them to fight. I’ve watched it recently and, well, let’s be charitable and say it does not hold up well. Though there is considerably more gay subtext between Mandrake and Lothar than I thought.

Tom Brayve – Tom Brayve is Flash Gordon and John Carter of Mars, the man from earth who got taken to space and became a hero. Due to the influence of Defenders of the Earth at a young age, it was natural for a Flash Gordon analogue to lead the team, and to be the fountain of wisdom. Flash Gordon and John Carter succeed due to their unique perspective, their distance from the conflicts at hand. So, then, is Tom Brayve able to distance himself.

Tom Brayve traveled to the other side of the galaxy via an Aleph, which is stolen…I mean, is an homage to Borges’s story “The Aleph.” Borges’s Aleph was a point in which you could see every moment throughout space and time—in typical Borges fashion, it was in a shitty poet’s basement—while mine is one you can actually step through. Is a portal to anywhere going to show up again? You better believe it.

Doc Cosmos – A blatant Doc Savage rip, with a little of PLANETARY’s version, Axel Brass, for good measure. One thing about Doc Savage that stuck with me was that he always seemed incredibly lonely; raised from birth to be a crime-fighting adventurer, Savage was always trying to cobble a makeshift family around himself. So that became Cosmos’s defining trait.

Well, that and his hamminess. What’s the point of having pulp heroes if you can’t have them make bold pronouncements about being “The Ultimate Man” and thundering “By science!”

Rachnae – Rachnae comes from a whole host of dark vigilantes—she lists them, in fact—but the primary sources are The Spider, The Shadow, The Phantom and The Avenger. The Spider is where she get’s her name, the Avenger was a man whom people thought was a walking corpse due to his paralyzed face and deathly pallor, the Phantom is “the Ghost Who Walks,” and the Shadow knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.

The best Shadow stories always gave him some gallows humor to match his omnipresent laugh, and so Rachnae gets some of the best jokes in the show.

Can you believe I’ve been doing audio dramas for over ten years and this is the first time I’ve done a Shadow riff? How did I miss that?

Op. 7 speaks in Polari, a British gay slang used from the 30s through the 70s. Back when being gay could get you arrested, having a code to not only talk about your life with no one being the wiser, but also have a recognition point for anyone nearby who was in the know.

The idea of making a James Bond pastiche a closeted gay man was something that was too good to let go of. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Honestly, it maybe the only way to reconcile Bond’s rampant misogyny: he either treats women that way because he hates them or treats women that way because he’s overcompensating to hide his true desires. Which would you prefer?

Andy wanted to do the whole show in a Sean Connery impression, but I didn’t want the reference to be that direct. He did get to slip it in when he quotes MACBETH, though, so we all win.

“Night’s black agents,” by the by, is a reference to literal predators. One of the fascinating things about the pulps is that while the characters are heroic, they are also often horrible people.

Abigail Airheart – The aviator is a classic pulp trope, as is the excitable kid, and Abigail gets to be both. She’s essentially the Rocketeer. As much as I fancy myself a detached spaceman like Tom Brayve, Abigail is probably the character who is the closest to who I am. I take in a lot at once, and sometimes miss the details until it’s too late.

It’s Abigail who reveals the most about the Lacuna, due to their relationship. Abigail isn’t closeted like Op. 7, she’s a free spirit. I’ve said in the past that whenever I need characters to reference a relationship, I make it queer one, because if I don’t explicitly state the characters are queer they will be assumed to be straight. Eventually, we’re going to reach the point where everyone just assumes everyone in my show is queer.

What a great day that will be.

Anyway, Abigail knows the Lacuna’s secret identity, Ximena Kondo, and that she came from a line of Chilean poets and Japanese shrine maidens. Ximena was just a great name to use, but Kondo is a direct reference to Marie Kondo, former shrine maiden turned tidying-up guru. Kondo believes if something does not give you joy when you hold it, you should get rid of it. A lesson most of the End of Timers should take to heart.

Let’s see….anything else? A lot of the themes—and the title!—of this episode where taken wholesale from Barbra Kingslover’s The Lacuna. Its a fantastic book and you should read it.

It’s nothing like this episode.

I asked the cast to show up in full costume for the performance, and as you can see, they did not disappoint. I made some Pinterest boards to guide them. You can look at them here:

If you’re a Patreon backer, you can watch a video of the performance. Which, as you can see from theseclips, was pretty incredible.

The other day, a cashier wished me “Good luck with the dragon” as I walked away.

I’m going to start using that as a farewell. I know I’ve got the “I’ll think of something” sign-off, here. But I think this is better. After all, we could all use a little luck with the dragon, right? Whatever your dragon may be.

Almost a year ago, when I asked Strix to be a part of the Voice of Free Planet X, I warned her of two things: 1) her character was integral to the metaplot, so she would be on a lot of episodes, and 2) one of those episodes would be essentially a monologue. Neither of those bothered her, and when I finally delivered this script to her, she dug into it with both hands. Not everyone can handle a 2nd-person future-tense speech delivered to themselves in the past, but Strix took it all in stride. She’s an astounding performer, and this is one of the greatest performances I’ve had the pleasure to record.

It’s an odd show–I know I say that about every episode; it’s always true–but it’s doesn’t feel odd. Strix grounds the more fantastic parts of the script in real tangible, emotion. Which could not have been easy when you have a story about a someone violently interacting with their doubles from alternate earths.

When I listen to this episode, I think about that conversation we had back then. And I am so grateful that she agreed then, so that you can hear this now.

This weekend is the beginning of the Philadelphia Podcast Festival, and this afternoon is the VFPX component of said festival, “The Wake Of The Lacuna.” I’m so excited for this, folks! We had a rehearsal last night, and it was absolutely amazing. It’s more of an actual play than an audio play–the actors are doing all sort of reaction stuff that will delight the live audience but will be lost on the audio. If you’re in the area, there’s no reason you shouldn’t come. It’s free, it’s at 4pm today at the Art Church of West Philadelphia.

If you’re not in the area, there might be a video for Patreon backers. So if you’re not a Patreon backer, maybe you should consider it? There’s some nice bonus stuff there.

Backer or not, you will get to hear “The Wake Of The Lacuna” on the podcast feed in September. I’m really proud of this show, it’s great script, the cast is superb, and I honestly don’t know if I’m ever going to top it.

For those who have listened to the episode already, you know what half of it is in Russian, talked over by disaffected BBC translators. Now, I flirted with the idea of taking some Russian audio from some YouTube video, and just laying Graham and Alasdair’s brilliantly bored readings over top. But, I wanted it to be real Russian, so I asked if anyone could translate the script for me.

Mildred Cady and Marnen Laibow Kaiser volunteered and did some amazing work. But, translating one of my weird scripts into another language is big job, and it took more time than any of us was expecting. And so, the episode that was scheduled for March hits your ears in August.

Worth the wait, though. While it took long than expected, this episode came together wonderfully well, from Chris’s fantastic Brainfever to John Davis’s amazing Ursa Major. It was ambitious, and the whole episode might be too meta for some tastes, but I adore it.

Speaking of supervillains, I saw SUICIDE SQUAD recently. A few days before, I watched this video about BATMAN V SUPERMAN and the idea of scenes and moments. Quick version (though you should really watch the video) moments are bits of visual splendor that stick with you, scenes move plot and character development forward.In movies, you can have great moments in a great scene, or they can be split a part. Moments are good for montages, pauses for emotional depth, and dream sequences. Scenes are good for, well, everything else.

Say what you want about Zack Snyder and David Ayer’s directing skills, they are, clearly comicbook fans. Both worked very hard to get particular visuals from the superhero comics they love on to the screen. They are dedicated to recreating their favorite comics on the big screen.

Trouble is, comics are nothing but moments. The elasticity of time in comics means that giant word-balloons can be crammed into panels, allowing whole conversations to occur during an action that takes half a second. But time is not elastic in movies–though Snyder, with his love of slow-motion, is certainly trying his best. Movie moments cannot contain scenes, which is why, no matter how great the cinematic moment is, it stops the film momentum. Great directors can use that to powerful emotional effect. Snyder and Ayer just seem to be tracing their favorite panels.

There’s also a flip-side to this, where creators raised on TV and movies make comics that mainly scenes, but hardly any moments.

I’m not going to name names, but you’ve read them. And you’ve instantly forgot about them.

We’ll be transforming the West Philadelphia Art Church into the headquarters of the End of Time Club, a collection of pulp-style heroes. Yep, there’s nothing these daring explorers, daredevil pilots and dark viliglantes can’t face!

Except perhaps, the loss of one of their own.

When the brilliant detective known as the Lacuna goes missing, its up the remaining End of Timers to make sense of the mystery!

The whole idea was really just to take advantage of Kenendy’s delightful Eartha Kitt impression, to have her place the ill-tempered cosmic monarch. I was originally planning to go full-tilt space opera, get my Flash Gordon on. I suppose it says something about both me and this weird show I’ve created that when the opportunity to Buck Rogers the whole business appears, I decide to focus on conversations that I explicitly put in my own living room.

That milk gag, though. Still makes me giggle

My actual brother, Joel, an accomplished improv performer, riffed with me for the bulk of this episode. It’s fantastic to do this sort of thing with him, and if he had the time, I’d do a podcast where we just ramble about things every week. He’s a lot of fun to talk to, and there was so much that was said that didn’t make it into the episode. Joel’s got a ton of talent, and I love what the fictional version of him brings out in the fictional version of me (…this podcast is difficult to explain sometimes). So expect to hear more of him in the future.

Speaking of talented folks, all of the space-law in the episode was improvised on the spot by Wesley Fenza, an actual lawyer as well as being a top-notch improvisor. Like the conversation I had with Joel, Wesley’s stuff was hard to edit. There was a whole bit with a third-eye that sadly is on the cutting-room…space…on my hard drive?

We need to update ourclichés.

Next week sees the release of the long-awaited VFPX/Supervillain Corner crossover, starring none other than Comrade Cockroach. I’ve had an idea for this episode for years, ever since Chris started his show, so it was nice to finally bring it to fruition. It was a complex piece, but I’m very pleased with the result. I think you folks will dig it.

Short newsletter this time, as I am off to NC to be the Best Man in Joel’s wedding this weekend. You better believe I’m bringing the recorder just in case he has a spare moment. My sister, Kate, who played my long-suffering manager Opal Magestrix in Pledge Drives, will also be at the wedding, so hopefully we’ll get some sort of Axelrod-family scene. I don’t know about what.

This was a strange episode, written in a rush because P.J, Matt and Kennedy were all going to be at my house at the same time, and I couldn’t let that go without recording something. We recorded it in one night, and most of the what you hear is a single performance, like a play. It was incredibly thrilling to do an episode this way. I’d like to do more full-cast recordings like this, but scheduling voice actors is hard enough as it is. Still, it’d be nice to do it occasionally. The way the actors played off each other was worth the stress of pulling the story together in time for them to record.

The story is a odd duck, whimsical with a very, very dark undercurrent I’m not sure everyone caught. Or maybe you did. I mean, Peter Pan and the Lost Boys as a suicide cult, that makes sense, right? Not a stretch?

It might be a stretch. Still, heck of a great time making it.

If An Awfully Big Adventure was all about being quick, City of Sleepwas the opposite. Took awhile to get all the voice actors together to record. It’s not the most complex story of the new season–that dubious honor belongs to the upcoming Supervillain Corner crossover–but it’s on up there.

Luckily, I have some of the best voice actors around to call upon to make it work. Hillary, PJ., Len, Fred, J.R., and Jennifer all knock it out of the park.

It is without a doubt my favorite episode so far. There’s that weird, layered storytelling I like to do, and there’s a moment where you’re listening to a recording of people listening to a recording of people listening to a recording of a person listening to a recording, which makes me chuckle every time I think about it. Neil Gaiman once did an issue of The Sandman that had three layers of people telling stories within stories, and I’ve been wanting to do the found-audio equivalent for awhile now. And this story, which plays with the concepts of trust, deceit and recordings replacing memories (hi, Facebook), was perfect for that sort of rabbit hole.

While I have not lost a son to a ritualistic murder, I did have a son die not long after he was born. Corvin was born with a considerable amount of internal problems, and I knew he was not long for this world when I first took him into my arms. I did get to hold him, though, which is a blessing I will never forget. But I also felt his tiny, bird-like grow cold in my arms, which haunts me to this day.

Hartley is not Corvin, but in order to talk about chasing after my made-up son, I had to process my feelings about losing my real one. There’s a line in the episode that seems out of place on the surface, but utterly expresses how I felt after Corvin’s death. I’m talking about the possibilities of other alternate worlds, and meeting another me: “Maybe he could tell me what to do.”

There’s was a seemingly insurmountable feeling of powerlessness after Corvin’s came and went from my life. I wanted someone to tell me what to do, but I doubted anyone else could understand what I was going through well enough to give me good advice.

I’m glad I wrote this episode, but it was a hard thing to do. And I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface.

As hard as this episode was to write, it was incredibly easy to record. I’ve been wanting to have Sonia and Taleisha on the podcast since I decided to have voice actors. Strix, who reprises her role as the Deitator’s Domo from How’s It Gonna End, is fast becoming a VFPX MVP.

Expect to hear all of these women on the show again. They are too much fun to work with.

Also, how great is that chorus of people saying “I’m Jared Axelrod?” I put out a call on the social medias, and the response was overwhelming.

I have the best listening audience. I know every podcaster says that, but I really think its true in this case.

Saturday night I was at the Beaumont Wherehouse for the Sloppy Film Festival (just what it sounds like), and I was utterly taken by the space. It was like walking into the set of a Tom Waits video: geometric sculptures hung from the rafters, three pianos of questionable functionality hung out near the performance space, ramshackle bookshelves were stocked with odd tomes and animal masks. And lording over all of it, was this impressive proscenium:
I’m not planning a live show of VFPX, but if I was, this is the only place I want to do it at.

Extra special news for those of you who are local to Philly and have nothing to do tonight. I will be a special guest at the first SUPER SECRET Geekadelphia ‘Geekeasy’ event at Tattooed Mom on South St. You probably haven’t seen anything about it, because it’s, y’know, secret.

I am told there will be drink specials, giveaways, and SPECIAL VIP SECRET SPEAKERS (one of whom is me) talking about podcasting on a mini panel that’ll kick off at 8PM. The event itself starts at 7PM. Fee free to tell your friends, but only tell them by whispering about it in dark corners, or perhaps under streetlamps on a foggy evening.

It should be a blast. I’m not sure what I’m going to talk about tonight. Podcasting, obviously. But beyond that? I don’t know.

If you follow me on socialmedia, you probably remember me talking about how “Pledge Drives” was supposed to go up before “Welcome to the Hidden Almanac,” but was pushed back due to technical difficulties. At the time, I was little upset about it, but now, I’m actually kind of glad this episode ended up where it did. It felt right to open the new season with the Hidden Almanac crossover, and this episode does it’s job as a welcoming to the world of the show.

And what a world, that has such people in it! Listeners will recognize my sister Kate, reprising her role from “How’s It Gonna End?” as my GPR supervisor. Phil Thomas, who also put in a voice for “How’s It Gonna End?” shows up with his West Phillians partner Andy Holman. Jennifer Steen, of the much-missed podcast Jennisodes, is someone I’ve wanted to be on the show since I started looking for other people to voice it.

I recently saw Alexandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain, and it has quickly become one of my favorite films. It’s not for everyone–certainly not for anyone who has problems with plots that are barely there and weirdness for weirdness’s sake–and for all it’s dizzying heights, there are some pretty dismal lows. But it does have a scene where some meticulously-costumed iguanas and toads reinact the Spanish Conquest of Mexico (you can watch it here, with film’s score replaced by Apocalyptica’s cover of “Fade to Black”) and if you can’t see the brilliance in that, I’ve got nothing for you.

Yes, this is going to be referenced in an upcoming episode.

No, not in the way you think.

Actually, maybe in the way you think. You folks are pretty smart. You’ve probably got a lot of what I’m setting up already figured out.

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Jared Axelrod is an author, an illustrator, and a world changer. Through out her eventful life she has also been a circus performer, a puppeteer, a graphic designer, a sculptor, a costume designer, a podcaster and quite a few other things that she’s lost track of but will no doubt remember when the situation calls for it. But that “author’ business, that seems to be one she keeps coming back to.